Old Folks at Home & Abroad

A couple of very old characters developed some new wrinkles:

Harvey, who this week will make his 1,110th nonappearance in Manhattan's 48th Street Theater, may or may not have heard last week that he is getting a new drinking companion.* While Frank Fay takes a seven-week summer vacation starting July 12, Hollywood's 6 ft. 3 in. Jimmy Stewart will take charge of his lines and his invisible 6 ft. 1 in. rabbit. Producer Brock Pemberton said he offered Stewart his first Broadway role in seven years "between the acts one night a couple of weeks ago. Jimmy raved about the play and I put it up to him." Day after the news broke, know-it-all Hollywood Columnist Hedda Hopper burbled: "It's almost a foregone conclusion that he'll wind up playing the part on the screen."

Clarence Day Sr. outdid Jeeter Lester --or would this week, when Lindsay & Grouse's Life with Father gave its 3,183rd consecutive Broadway performance, one more than Tobacco Road's previous world record. For the occasion, co-author Howard Lindsay and wife Dorothy Stickney, the original Father & Mother, agreed to resume their roles for a one-night stand. The demand for tickets was so great that they decided to extend their stand to two weeks. Also for the occasion, the play's pressagents compiled some statistics:

P:During the play's seven-year road-&-Broadway run there have been 16 Fathers (including Percy Waram, Louis Calhern and Arthur Margetson) and 18 Mothers (including Dorothy Gish, Margalo Gillmore and Muriel Kirkland).

P:The cast has used up 57 red wigs, costing $9,000.

P:The cast has consumed onstage some 1,170 Ibs. of coffee, 800 gallons of milk, 3,200 loaves of bread, 19,000 oranges and 2,200 boxes of breakfast cereal.

P:A Miss Marya Waite of WInnetka, Ill. has paid to see the show 39 times.

In London, where Father bawled his lines for the first time last week, prospects were not so rosy. London's critics (like Rome's--TIME, March 24) took the old boy for a fall. Hmmed the Daily Graphic: "New York has been convulsed for seven years. . . . Why?" The Daily Telegraph found it "all very pleasant in an elementary way [but] not as good as all that." The News Chronicle was inclined to blame the slow-paced British cast (headed by Leslie Banks and Sophie Stewart), who "struggle hard not to give the impression that they are foundering in mid-Atlantic." Perhaps the Daily Express meant to be kinder: "A piece that you [should] . . . see whenever something in the news makes you ponder that pregnant question: The Americans, are they human?"

*His fourth. Joe E. Brown played Elwood P. Dowd on the road; Bert Wheeler last summer spelled Frank Fay on Broadway.

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